


A Pale Yellow Star

by Deejaymil



Series: SatuDeeToo's Adventures in Adventing [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Although Sirius does it via Patronus because he's a knob who can't use words, Angst with a Happy Ending, Christmas, Christmas Tree, Declarations Of Love, During the War, Loneliness, M/M, Marauders' Era, Meaningful names, Remus Remusing, Remus gets it anyway, Sirius 'I dont need you wait dont go' Black is the master of subtlety, Sirius being woeful, aka A Rowling Special
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 15:38:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16813558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Sirius had thought a lot about dæmons, growing up. It had been how he’d gotten through the darker times. He'd worried that becoming Animagi so early had forced their dæmons into settling, that first time they’d transformed turning Alaire into the stag and Alvah into the rat and Tristram herself into the great, black dog. But Trist as a dog had always felt right, and real, in a way. Like that was how it was supposed to be. And Alaire was male despite being James’s, despite dæmons seemingly almost always taking the opposite sex of their human—the stag felt fitting there too, as though he’d been male from the beginning because, at his core, James was a stag and not a doe even if he’d always had the potential to be deer-like. But Remus and his dæmon?Sirius was starting to realise that maybe Remus hadn't been quite as lucky as the rest of them.





	A Pale Yellow Star

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Advent Prompt: 1st December: WolfStar daemon AU - setting up the Christmas tree.
> 
> Thanks, SatuD2 for the awesome prompt! I am now well and truly bitten by the Harry Potter daemon AU bug and have all kinds of plots bubbling up for a long Marauder-era daemon fic...
> 
> For those who are unfamiliar with the His Dark Materials universe, this is basically all you need to know (taken from the wiki)
> 
> **"A dæmon /ˈdiːmən/ is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person's 'inner-self' that takes the form of an animal. Dæmons have human intelligence, are capable of human speech—regardless of the form they take—and usually behave as though they are independent of their humans. Pre-pubescent children's dæmons can change form voluntarily, almost instantaneously, to become any creature, real or imaginary. During their adolescence a person's dæmon undergoes "settling", an event in which that person's dæmon permanently and involuntarily assumes the form of the animal which the person most resembles in character. Dæmons and their humans are almost always of different genders."**

It was a woeful kind of Christmas, really, all the wrong kinds of empty. The kind of Christmas that Sirius could tell was going to end with him banging around in all the waiting holes this war was leaving in his life. Like the James shaped one that had started when the git had married Lily—as happy as Sirius was for them, really, it had been the beginning of the end—and the Peter shaped one that had followed when the dude had gotten squirrelly and weird, hiding himself away from everything that was awful right now.

Which was everything, Sirius thought woefully, cracking open another bottle of firewhisky and throwing himself moodily into his sofa. It sagged and dipped under his weight, the innards complaining as something creaked. The flat was silent. The firewhisky burned.

Sirius tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and remembered how it had used to be. The oldest cliché really, that school was the best time of your life, but it wasn’t exactly a high bar to surmount these days, with old Mouldy-pants out there hunting down his best friend and all his companions scattered to the wind. Just him in this empty flat they’d used to share, him and—

Hot air whuffed disapprovingly into his face.

Sirius opened his eyes, staring upside-down at the face staring back at him.

“You’re going to get us drunk,” said Tristram with uncharacteristic Remus-ness, the dog-dæmon for some reason disapproving of this. “And then we’re going to get hungover and you’re going to be in a right shit of a mood all Christmas day.”

“I’m already in a right shit of a mood,” Sirius snapped. “What’s there to be bloody jolly about, mutt?”

Trist lowered her head, still disapproving, still looking annoyingly like a certain sandy-haired tosspot who’d fucked off just as quickly as the rest of them and without any of the excuses James and Lily had of trying to avoid being super-murdered. If that sandy-haired tosspot was actually a pitch-black shepherd looking dog thing, anyway. They had the same eyebrows, at least. And the same bad breath. And the same—

“He said he’d visit,” said Trist.

“If he does, you should bite him. I’m mad at him which means _you’re_ mad at him, but it doesn’t matter because he’s not coming, so there.” Refusing to admit that he was sulking, Sirius untipped his neck and instead downed another searing gulp of Ogden’s Old. Childish, him? Pah.

“You’re not mad at him,” his dog-dæmon said, padding around the sofa to nose at the whisky, which Sirius yanked away from her. “You’re worried because he hasn’t owled even though you specifically went into detail about charming the Bonneville to fly in order to goad a reply.”

Sirius stared at the roof, wondering why his dæmon had chosen now to be perceptive instead of unruly, right when all he wanted to do was drown his sorrows and sleep the whole way through Christmas eve and beyond.

“I’m not worried about Moony,” he lied. Outside the flat, carollers were singing. With a temperamental flick of his wand, he switched on the radio and drowned them out with WWN and the moody baritone of Lorcan d’Eath. Fitting. Moony hated Lorcan. Sirius wasn’t a fan either, but right now anything Remus hated sounded just grand.

“Yes, you are. And Prongs. You can’t lie to me—I am you, and we’re lonely.”

Sirius hated her.

“Fuck this,” Sirius declared. All he wanted for Christmas was to be black-out wasted; with that, he got hard at work making this dream come true.

* * *

He woke up warm, with Trist flopped over his legs as she slowly roused with him, and a blanket tucked over the both of them. The fire was going, which he was pretty sure he hadn’t bothered with before passing out, and when he turned his head and fumbled for the bottle he’d fallen asleep grasping and dropped in the interim, it was nowhere to be found. Instead, his hand knocked a mug of water, spilling the contents all over his ratty carpet.

While he blinked blearily at the spilled water, it unspilled itself, the mug righting itself and the water funnelling back in.

“It’s going to taste like carpet now,” Sirius said without looking away from the mug, his head pounding and his throat as dry as sand. “Carpet and dust. No one hoovers here.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have knocked it over then,” came the dry reply.

Sirius sucked in a sharp breath that tasted like sour whisky, swallowing hard to try to push the sand down his throat. On his legs, Trist was silent, her grey eyes watching beyond his shoulder to the armchair behind him.

No one spoke.

Nails clicked on the tiles of the kitchen before the carpet muffled them. Counting the seconds until the owner of those overgrown paws appeared in his view, Sirius closed his eyes and braced himself before opening them and looking down to where a mangy wolf-dæmon was reaching her scarred muzzle out to nose at Trist’s shoulder.

“Geddoff,” Sirius muttered at the wolf-dæmon as she put her paws on the sofa and snuffed at Trist. “Arneb, fuck off. You’re going to give us fleas.”

“Don’t be an arse, Sirius,” said Remus, the armchair creaking as he stood up. “We flew all last night and today to get here. You know how much Nebby hates flying.”

“I don’t like going in the bag,” the wolf-dæmon whined, tail tucked between her skinny legs. Sirius scowled at that stupid tail and her stupid legs and the stupid, skinny slope of her weird body; she was barely even a wolf, especially when contrasted against Trist who was solid and shiny and proud, instead of Arneb’s weird scraggly fur and nervously wide ears and skittish paws. She was shaped like a wolf draped over the skeleton of something much smaller and more frightened, and it upset him to consider that because he’d prefer that Remus’s soul be somewhat _stronger,_ especially if Sirius wasn’t there to…

The thought trailed off, Sirius huffing it away. Arneb was still complaining: “It’s boring in there. And we still have James’s broom, so the bag smells like Alaire, and he’s always muddy.”

Despite not being able to see Remus, Sirius knew he was looming fretfully, like an old nana. Everything Remus did was nana-like, _everything_. He was twenty-years-old turning eighty-two, and Sirius made a mental note to buy him some knitting needles for Christmas—right before realising that, depending on what time it was, it was already Christmas.

A hand touched Sirius’s shoulder. Finally, giving in, Sirius rolled over and sat up, looking at his friend.

“Wotcha, Moony,” said Sirius. He couldn’t hide the coolness to his tone. “Good to see you’re alive. I was beginning to wonder, you know—” The coolness was fading, the pitch to his voice becoming annoyingly worked up: “—because normal people owl their mates when they fuck off into the middle of a warzone to parade around with dark creatures, yanno? Normal people don’t leave their mates sitting at home by themselves wondering if everyone is dead and—”

“Drinking all the firewhisky?” Remus cut in, pointing the wand he was holding to the empty bottles lined up by the sink. “Isolating himself? I know for a fact Jorkins wouldn’t mind you spending Christmas with her instead of freezing your tail off here.”

“Jorkins is an idiot looking to marry her way into my _esteemed_ family line.” Sirius figured he better tone back the bitterness soon or Remus was going to start suspecting that he, Sirius, was cross with him. “Maybe I should, huh? Hook up with daft old Bertha, make some pure-blood babies, live happily the fuck ever after, huh? Wouldn’t be worried about being ignored on Christmas then, or making myself sick thinking about everything that could go wrong with her taking off without telling me oh so secret jobs for Albus fucking Dumbledore—”

“Maybe you should,” Remus said, his shoulders sloping down a little as though some terrible weight had fallen on them, dropped by Sirius’s caustic tongue. “You could be happy, you know… with a family and a wife and normality and everything you deserve, not…”

He didn’t speak, just gestured vaguely at the shabby room around them. Sirius assumed that he was gesturing not only to this shithole flat but also to the Order and the war and the knife hanging over the Potters’ heads and maybe even gesturing to himself as well and the curse that lurked in him. Like that meant Sirius should shelve him alongside everything else that was crap and terrible at the moment.

That implication pissed Sirius off, a lot.

Despite his head and gut complaining as he launched off the sofa and strode towards Remus, he didn’t let it slow him up—grabbing his friend by the front of his tattered robes and hauling him against him in a desperate, aching hug that Remus returned with a great exultation of withheld air, his sharp nails digging into Sirius’s back with the force he was holding him. They clung like that for the longest beat of time in the silent, warm room, Sirius pressing his mouth into the oily hair of his shorter friend, their hearts hammering.

It was Sirius who turned the hug into something else, dipping out and back in to find the turned-down mouth of the other man and slotting his own lips against it, Remus stumbling backwards with the force of Sirius’s kiss. They stumbled into the wall, Sirius pushing him hard there as he sought to reclaim every last inch of the man he’d thought he’d lost.

“Don’t,” he panted, breaking every word up with another panicky kiss, “don’t, do, _that_ , got it? Don’t vanish. Don’t fucking vanish, you berk, just _don’t.”_

“I’m sorry,” Remus gasped into his open mouth, choking down a breath that dragged and hurt Sirius deeply, closing his eyes against how wet and miserable it sounded. “I couldn’t tell you—Dumbledore said I couldn’t and it was to help James, I’m sorry. What did you want me to tell him?”

“How about ‘sorry, Albus, but I gotta talk to Sirius about this, seeing as we’ve been knobbing each other since sixth year’,” Sirius suggested, yanking his head back with his hands still bunched through Remus’s robes, holding him hard against the wall so he couldn’t escape. A muffled yelp behind him told him that Trist was similarly pinning Nebby, probably furiously licking her, the weirdos. Remus watched him, green eyes wide and pale skin just barely flushed. He looked sicker than usual, skinny to boot, and almost gaunt. Not looking after himself, he never _did_ when Sirius and the others weren’t there and he would have been alone for the last full moon with another coming in—Sirius glanced at the calendar he’d stabbed to the wall with a large knife in a fit of irritation at Remus not telling him when his problem night was coming up—eight or so days. “And then add on, ‘hey, Sirius has a flying bike and a knack for duelling, why doesn’t he tag along if we keep it clean?'”

Remus shook his head, a thin smile appearing on his cracked lips. “That bike,” he murmured, dipping his head. Something in Sirius’s gut thumped hard at the way his hair, already thinning but still retaining the gentle curls of their school years, flopped into his eyes. “I’m angry about the bike, just so you know. That thing will kill you and then Prongs will kill me for not dissuading you of the harebrained notion of flying it.”

“Dunno why he’d blame you, he knows I’m reckless.”

“If you haven’t noticed, James seems to think I hold your leash.” Remus rolled his eyes, his opinion on _that_ perfectly clear. “Dunno what gives him that idea though. You’re as capricious as a stray.”

“Ooo capricious, am I?” Sirius leaned close, nuzzling at Remus’s throat as the anger faded and left behind the reminder that it had been a while since any ‘knobbing’ had gone on, with Remus or otherwise, and it _was_ Christmas… “Sounds kinky. We should explore that.”

But Remus didn’t respond to Sirius’s teasing hands in his robe, or his mouth at his throat. He just leaned back against the wall, eyes swollen with purple lids and looking completely and utterly wankered. Sirius stopped, watching him closely.

“I know you’re mad at me,” Remus said, averting his gaze with guilt lining every wasted feature of the face that had been a lot healthier before he’d vanished off on this secret job for Dumbledore, “but I’m exhausted, Sirius. If you don’t want me here, I’ll go, but please let me sleep first. I can apparate to Peter’s if I have to…”

“Are you kidding?” Nebby said from behind them. “If you apparate like this, you’ll splice us for sure. They’re not going to kick us out—what part of him sucking your face off implied he was going to?”

“Besides,” Sirius added, “you got the fire going. Be a bit shit of me to kick you out after that, seeing as I’d have happily spent Christmas freezing if you hadn’t showed. Freezing and drunk. Honestly, you showing up is a massive improvement on at least one of those things.”

Remus laughed, but the laugh was tired. And Sirius held him for just a second more before leading him to the sofa and tossing the blanket—it wasn’t his, so he assumed Remus had conjured it, since most of the blankets in the flat were distinctly smelly—over top of him.

“Sleep,” he told Remus firmly, stepping aside so Nebby could leap up and curl into the tightest possible ball of grey and tan fur behind the crook of Remus’s knee, none of Trist’s usual sprawling out going on there. “We’ll be angry at each other when the holiday is up, got it? Until then, I’ve got to get Christmas ready—we’re both alive and here to celebrate it, so let’s _celebrate_ it.”

“It’s Christmas now,” Remus pointed out, eyes already drifting shut and voice slurring a little. “Do you need help? I can cook or clean, why don’t you ever clean, you’ll get doxies soon…” Sirius backed up, pausing by the kitchen door and taking his wand out to silently cast a sleep hex over the sofa, Remus immediately going limp.

“He’s going to be mad if he realises you hexed him,” Trist pointed out, lying down beside the sofa with the nonchalant air of a dog just picking this spot to sleep for no particular reason.

“Well, if he’s tired enough not to notice a sleep hex, he deserves it,” Sirius retorted. “Now, stay there and watch them. I’ve got some cheer to prepare.”

* * *

When Remus awoke, Christmas was ready!

“Merry Christmas,” Sirius said proudly, gesturing to the everything he’d worked his arse off on while Remus was snoring.

Remus just stared.

“It’s a Christmas tree,” Sirius explained, seeing that maybe Remus was a bit dozy right now and thus needed gentle handling. Gentle handling in this case meant ‘explain it as clealy as if he was James', who could be a bit of a dumbarse when he wasn't being surprisingly brilliant. “See?” He flicked his wand, beaming as the decorations he’d draped around the room all glittered along.

“It’s your motorbike,” said Remus blankly, staring some more at it. “You’ve just put tinsel on it.”

“Tinsel is Christmassy. It’s _festive_.” Sirius jabbed his wand a bit harder, the tinsel glittering brightly along. “See? Sparkle sparkle.”

Remus leaned his head on his arm, still staring a bit blearily. “Putting tinsel on something doesn’t make it festive. It just… puts tinsel on it.”

Sirius begged to differ; the tinsel he’d carefully draped over Remus’s head was sure making him look festive as heck.

“Well, I tarted up the fireplace too,” Sirius pointed out, now feeling a bit hard done by. “Look, see?”

He pointed to the tinsel there too. It had started running out by this point, but he’d made it work. Sort of.

“And I cooked,” he added, folding his arms over the apron he’d found in a drawer he’d never gone in before—who knew he owned tea towels all this time?? And to think he’d been wiping plates on his shirt when he couldn’t be arsed wand-drying them— “So we’ve got a Christmas dinner—where are you going?”

Remus had slid his legs off the sofa, standing up and stretching before reaching for his coat.

“I’m going to get a tree,” he said with a wry smile. “One that’s not quite so… greasy.”

“You apologise to her!” Sirius yelled after in defence of his bike’s honour, but the door was already swinging shut and cutting off Remus’s fading laughter.

* * *

Dinner was a bit browned, but neither of them really minded. Sitting together on the ground beside their new tree—Remus had treenapped a sapling from a nearby park and engorged it a bit to add tinsel and charmed flakes of snow—Sirius had his leg leaned against Remus’s and his hand dangerously close to trailing overtop of Remus’s unguarded one. Hangover gone and Christmas almost over, they were only just now decorating their tree… but he didn’t really mind, he guessed. At least he wasn’t alone.

And sitting here, warm and full and with Remus beside him, he could hope.

“When do you think this war is going to end?” he asked quietly, leaning back and watched Remus nudging the snowflakes into place with the tip of his wand. “Prongs must be going mad, all hidden away. Man, will he be glad to be loose one You-Know-Who is dealt with.”

Remus gave him a look. Sirius averted his eyes, sensing that that look was probably to do with him being the one everyone thought was James’s secret-keeper… well, the more people that thought that, the better. He was ready for whatever Mouldy threw at him.

Remus included. When this was all over, he’d apologise for keeping it from him.

“I don’t know,” Remus said finally, lowering his wand and staring at the tree. Sirius had jinxed the tips of the pine needles to glow different colours and, as Remus watched them, he fiddled a bit more to make them flicker in a pattern just to make his friend smile. “It feels like it’s never going to end. The hatred runs so deep, I can’t see a future where it’s back to normal…”

“Nothing abnormal about hate,” Sirius commented, thinking of home. “It’s always been there.”

Remus said nothing, just reached out to stroke Nebby’s ears. There was something strange about the way his fingers traced them, some melancholy misery lining his every movement. Sirius watched curiously, before breaking.

“Whatcha thinking, Moony?” he asked.

Remus glanced at him, eyes worried for a moment before he tried—and failed—to mask the look. While he pondered over whatever his wrinkly old brain was pondering, Sirius messed around with the tree some more—making the needle-tips flicker in the shape of a wolf, then a stag, then a pretty lady with her butt out for them—earning a sigh from Remus—and then, on a whim and with a sudden memory popping up into his brain, Sirius turned the lights into the shapes of two rangy hares loping after each other around the tree.

Remus made a low, pained noise.

The lights flickered out, Sirius lowering his wand.

“Okay, now you gotta tell me,” he demanded, dropping his wand and tilting onto his side so he could reach up and curl his hand around Remus’s jaw, making him look at him. “What’s with the noises? And the woeful-oh-no-I’m-sad looks and the sighing? It’s like spending Christmas with Prongs, back when he was trying to get into Lily’s skirt.”

“Why hares?” Remus asked, his voice croaking. Nebby whined, nudging Remus’s other arm hard with her narrow snout, her eyes worried under their fuzzy brows. “Why’d you do that?”

Sirius did not want to answer that. At least, he figured he didn’t—he hadn’t kept mum about it for this long without reason.

But a part of him did.

“We got into a bit of a mess a little bit ago,” Trist said from her place curled around Nebby. “Just after you left…” Remus’s face darkened; probably rightfully assuming this ‘bit of a mess’ came about because Sirius had tried to follow him. “Pissed off something that got a bit nasty. Sirius got rid of it…”

And she trailed off.

“Where exactly did this ‘mess’ happen?” Remus asked with a dangerous level of calm in his voice, Nebby’s hackles rising.

“Definitely not South America,” Sirius said quickly. “I mean, man, as if I’d even have the means or inclination to go over there, right?”

“Means like a flying bike?” Remus said with a pointed look behind Sirius. “Inclination like poking your nose into something you’ve been told to leave alone? Damnit, Sirius, you could have been killed! You could have gotten _me_ killed! What was it? What attacked you? Are you hurt?”

“We’re not hurt,” Trist said quickly, ignoring Sirius’s glare. “I told you—he got rid of it, with a Patronus, and that’s when we noticed—”

“A Patronus?” Remus said, going white. “A Lethifold? You were following me! That was what was guarding… _Sirius,_ how could you?”

“My Patronus is corporal now,” Sirius blurt out, cutting off the lecture he could feel looming. “It was corporal, Remus—it’s never been corporal before. And it was…”

He stopped, breathing in for a moment before deciding to just _show_ him; he lifted his wand, looked for the same memory he’d used that day when the dark creature had swooped down upon him and his dæmon, and he whispered the spell. Despite his hoarse voice, the light that leapt from his wand was furiously bright, zipping around the room with long, loping strides until it paused for a moment by Nebby, sitting upright on its hind legs with its ears high and expression alert.

“A hare,” Remus breathed, sounding stunned, like he couldn’t believe it. Which made sense, Sirius guessed, since only James had been able to cast a corporal Patronus so far and, well, a hare was such a weird shape… he, Sirius Black, a lowly hare? Ridiculous. What about him suggested he was rabbity?

The Patronus faded, the room seeming grim and lonely once it was gone.

“I mean, it’s weird,” Sirius complained. “Most people’s Patronuses turn into their dæmon’s form, right? Or the dæmon of someone they love, something linked to protection for them. At least, that’s what Dumbledore used to say in advanced duelling. Why isn’t mine Trist? Or something _cool.”_

Remus was still staring at the spot the hare had faded, something strange and hopeful appearing in his eyes. Sirius frowned at him.

“What?” he asked, feeling suspicious of the smile that had appeared and was now growing, the glee wiping away all this new exhaustion from his friend’s face and leaving him looking young and vigorous again. “What’s got you so peppy all of a sudden?”

“I read a book while I was gone,” Remus said, turning that look on Sirius and barely managing to hide whatever weirdness had struck him suddenly. “I mean, I read books everywhere I go, but I found this one… it was this old journal from a man who’d spent his life studying, uh… werewolves. And it had all sorts of information in it, things I’ve never known…” He paused, his hand coming up to touch at the old scars before dropping once more. Sirius didn’t speak. “And this one thing it did mention was how horrendously cruel it was to bite a child. It, uh, suggested that the best outcome of a child being bitten was to…” He swallowed.

Sirius fumed. “What a git,” he snapped. “That’s monstrous and bullshit and you know it—”

“I know,” Remus said quietly. “But that’s not what caught my eye. The reason he thought it was so terrible when a child was bitten was because of their dæmon. If an adult is changed, usually their dæmon is already settled… they retain their original form. They’re who they’ve always been except cursed now, and their dæmon is the same as _they’ve_ always been except during the period of the full moon when they’re drawn into the werewolf and devoured by it, a period of soullessness.” He was shaking a little as he said this, Nebby tremoring with him. Despite the fact that Sirius had seen this, seen the way Nebby dissipated as the change ripped through Remus and how she’d always returned when the change was over, he shivered too. To be without his dæmon, even temporarily… “But a child? The curse forces a form onto their dæmon, forces settlement. I… we never knew why Nebby settled early.”

“But now we do,” Nebby added, ears low and tail out of sight. “ _He_ made us settle like this. In _this_ shape.” And she bared her sharp fangs, looking wolfy and angry and very, very dangerous.

Sirius didn’t know what to say. They’d worried that becoming Animagi so early had forced their dæmons into settling, that first time they’d transformed turning Alaire into the stag and Alvah into the rat and Tristram herself into the great, black dog. But Trist as a dog had always felt _right_ , and real, in a way. Like that was how it was supposed to be. And Alaire was male despite being James’s, despite dæmons seemingly almost always taking the opposite sex of their human—the stag felt fitting there too, as though he’d been male from the beginning because, at his core, James was a stag and not a doe even if he’d always had the potential to be deer-like.

Sirius had thought a lot about dæmons, growing up. It had been how he’d gotten through the darker times.

“Neb’s never felt right,” Remus finished roughly. “She’s never felt like she’s in the proper skin, like its fits her or me. We’ve always known that she’s wrong, and I think people can tell when they look at her, even if just unconsciously. You always used to say she was a weird wolf, all…”

“Wonky,” Sirius joked weakly, regretting every joke now.

Remus nodded. “Anyway, after we read that it was bothering us, so we were trying to figure out what she should be, if, you know…” He gestured to the scars again, Sirius aching to kiss him and wipe away everything cruel that had ever happened to a boy who didn’t deserve it, not _this_ man who had been _that_ boy who’d always been too sweet and quiet to face down a monster. “And I looked up her name, because you know dæmon names can be meaningful a lot.”

“Not always though,” Trist said with a huff.

“But sometimes,” Remus said firmly. “And she’s a star, Sirius. Arneb is the name of a star.”

His hand crept out, fingers curling around Sirius’s and holding tight, his palm clammy and grip shaken.

“A double star, pale yellow and grey,” Remus kept saying, his cheeks pinker now as his voice dropped low, “in the body of the Hare constellation. And when I read that, it wasn’t a great time, I guess. Things weren’t looking good. I didn’t… I didn’t think I was going to make it home—”

“For Christmas?” Sirius asked.

Remus just swallowed.

“Sure,” he said finally. “I didn’t think I was going to make it back… for Christmas… and I didn’t know if I could do what Albus asked of me. And if I didn’t find what he needed, James… anyway, I didn’t have much hope. And then I read that and found Arneb in a star map and I knew… I knew I had to come back, because sometimes, just _sometimes,_ names mean something important, something we don’t know. And Arneb means I needed to be here… which would probably have been around the point you were casting a Patronus to save your life and finding that it had changed. And that feels like fate, don’t you think? That feels important.”

“I don’t understand,” Sirius complained. His Christmas had gotten all weird, all feelsy and gay, and he shook his head at Remus and expressed his annoyance in a put upon face. “You’re being an oddball again, Remus, just speak _plainly.”_

“Okay,” said Remus with a shy smile, leaning forward to press his nose against Sirius’s, almost but not quite kissing him. “I love you, and that’s why I made it home in time for Christmas, got it? Idiot.”

Startled by this declaration, Sirius kissed him back. “I’m not saying that,” he said quickly. “I don’t commit, you know that. Not me. I’m free range and footloose, and I wasn’t worried at all that you’d die. Not even a little.”

“It’s okay,” said Remus, Nebby turning her head to lick Trist’s ear. “We know.”

Sirius supposed they did. A Patronus said a whole lot more than words did from the mouth of someone like him.

So, in the end, all he said was, “Merry Christmas,” hoping upon hope that 1980 would bring something better into their lives, but appreciating that, for now, this was what he had and what he had meant something important.

Just like a name.

**Author's Note:**

> **Excerpt from 'The Brightest Wizards' Guide to the Most Powerful of Our Stars' by Eoin Bogart**
>
>> "The brightest star of the Lepus constellation is **Arneb** (Arabic for “the hare”), the quarry of the neighbouring constellation, Orion, the hunter who pursues the hare with his hounds. The fiercest of these hounds, the most loyal, is Canis Major who contains the luminous dog star and who represents the unyielding protectiveness of the greatest of hounds. Some wizards upon viewing these constellations locked in their eternal chase have pointed out that Canis Major and the stars within stand between Orion and his prey, the hare.
>> 
>> It is left for one to wonder where the hound's great loyalty lies: with the man who leashes him or with the tempestuous beast that flees him eternally, for surely the hare would have fallen to the darkness long ago if not for the hound beside him."


End file.
